Stories By Great Danes Are Not Dogs

by Stephen J. Gertz

The literature of mid-nineteenth century Denmark is the subject this anthology of tales and verse selected and translated by Mrs. Anne Bushby (b. ? - d. 1875). 

“Most of the following stories have appeared, from time to time, in the ‘New Monthly Magazine,’ and a few in other periodicals. They are now gathered together, and it is hoped that they may convey a favourable impression of the lighter literature of Denmark, a country rich in genius, science, and art” (Prefatory note).

Included are stories and poems by Hans Christian Andersen (“Morten Lange. A Christmas Story” and “The Man from Paradise. A Comic Tale”); Carl Bernhard aka A.N. Saint-Aubain (“Cousin Carl,” “Aunt Francisca,” “Damon and Pythas,” and “The Bankrupt”); novelist and poet Bernard Severin Ingemann (“The Doomed House,” “The Secret Witness,” “All Souls’ Day,” “The Aged Rabbi. A Jewish Tale,” and “The Death Ship”); Carit Etlar (“Too Old,” “The Shipwrecked Mariner’s Treasure,” and “Twice Sacrificed”); poet Hans Peter Holst (“Lisette’s Castles in the Air”), poet and playwright Adam Oehlenschlager (“Death and His Victims”), and others.

The translations were not universally admired; Mrs. Bushby took liberties; hers is not a literal translation. Yet she understood what the authors meant and captured the underlying sense of their work.

"Mrs Bushby is in many ways an interesting translator, who did not see Andersen as simply a children's writer, and that some of her divergences from Andersen's text are not mistakes but deliberate adaptations for the benefit of her audience in Victorian Britain...Mrs Anne S. Bushby  knew Andersen personally, had indeed courted his acquaintance since his first visit to London in 1847, when her husband called upon him to invite him to dinner.

"At that time Andersen's English translator was Charles Beckwith Lohmeyer, but his English publisher, Richard Bentley, apparently encountered difficulties with him, and in a letter to Andersen dated 18 January 1853 suggested Mrs Anne Bushby instead, referring to her as 'a friend of yours, I believe.' How Mrs Bushby came to know Danish we do not know. However, it is remarkable that unlike most of Andersen's other translators from the same period, she seems to have translated mainly poetry, and of prose only Danish…

"...Mrs Bushby was not a professional translator, but that her work was indeed a labour of love. It is equally clear from examining the stories she chose that she was not aiming at the children's market, where stories like 'The Old Bachelor's Nightcap' have never belonged. Nor are her two volumes of tales (A Poet's Day Dreams (1853) and The Sand-hills of Jutland (I860) illustrated or in other ways made appealing to the young. Indeed it would seem that she saw it as her job to supplement the earlier translations, translating new work by Andersen rather than bringing out established successes in yet another version. This was undoubtedly also the attitude of her publisher, Bentley, who at one point complained to Andersen that competition was becoming so fierce and pirating so rife that only new work which could be published and sold before competitors could pirate it was reasonably sure of earning a profit... In the end, Bentley gave up publishing Andersen altogether" (Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen, Anne Bushby, Translator of Hans Christian Andersen, Gothenberg University, 2004).

Andersen's The Man From Paradise could not be more different than the children's stories that earned him fame. A widow, recently remarried, is depressed, thinking about her first husband in the great beyond while the second is away. Suddenly, she hears a knock on the door and presumes a ghost "or corpse-like form" will appear. It is, instead, a young man.

Upon questioning him she learns that he is on his way to Paris.  Unfortunately, she hears it as "Paradise," and asks him to give her love and that of their daughter to her late husband, as well as "his successor's compliments."

The young man, an itinerant con man, plays along, claiming to have met her husband in Paradise, who, according to him, is currently in bad shape and in need of all she can provide to him.

The widow loads the knave up with food and clothing and sends him on his way. Enter husband number two, who upon hearing his wife's tale "smelled a rat" and took off on horseback after him, not admitting his suspicions to his wife.

He catches up to the thief but is bamboozled into believing that the real bandit just passed by on foot a moment ago. Leaving his horse in trust with the stranger, the man takes off into the forest after the knave, who, as expected, mounts the horse and rides off, his laughter trailing behind him.

The duped and embarrassed husband schleps back home.

"'Well, did you find him?' asked his smiling wife.

He answered, in a tone subdued, 'My life,
I did. I found him, and--and--for your sake,
Our best, our swiftest horse I let him take,
That he with greater speed might find his way.'
The dame smiled on him, and in accents gay
Exclaimed, 'O best of husbands! who could find
Your equal--one so thoughtful, wise, and kind!'"

The similarity to a typical Raymond Carver short story is manifest in the tacit ending wherein the defeated husband collapses into the Lazy-Boy in the rec room of their seedy-side of the San Fernando Valley house-wreck in foreclosure, pours himself a tall whiskey, drains it, and proceeds to empty the .38 kept on the coffee table as a conversation piece, shot by shot, into the ceiling, a wall, the big-screen TV, a window, his framed high school diploma, the widow, and himself: what we talk about when we talk about love.

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[BUSHBY, Mrs. Anne, editor and translator]. The Danes Sketched by Themselves. A Series of Popular Stories by the Best Danish Authors. Translated by Mrs. Bushby. In Three Volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1864.

First edition. Three octavo volumes (7 7/8 x 4 15/16 inches; 200 x 125 mm.). [2, publisher’s advertisements], [6], 312; [4], 303, [1, blank]; [4], 303, [1, blank] pp.

Original terra cotta pebble-grain cloth with covers decoratively stamped in blind and spines ruled, decoratively stamped, and lettered in gilt. Original cream-colored endpapers.

Not in Sadleir or Wolff.
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When Charles Dickens Met Hans Christian Andersen: The Nightmare Visit

by Stephen J. Gertz

In June 1847, Hans Christian Andersen, who had won acclaim throughout Europe and America for his childrens stories, visited England for the first time. The great Dane earned triumphal social success during his summer in  London as the guest of  Countess Blessington, who attracted the cream of Europe's intelligentsia to her soirees. It was at one such gathering that Andersen was introduced to Charles Dickens, whom he greatly admired.

On July 30, 1847 Dickens, who reciprocated Andersen's admiration, paid a call on him at his lodgings. Andersen, however, was not present and so Dickens left the small parcel containing twelve presentation copies of his books as gifts accompanied with a note.

Of those twelve presentation copies, four were bequeathed to the Royal Library, Copenhagen, and seven were later sent to auction. Of those seven auctioned copies, only five have been accounted for: at Dickens' House, London; the Free Library in Philadelphia; a copy ultimately presented in 1956 to the Andersen Museum, Odense; the Webster Currie copy; and that at Sotheby's sale LN8412, lot 111. Only nine of the twelve copies are thus recorded. A few years ago I handled one of those three "lost" copies, a second edition of Pictures From Italy (1846).

"On his first visit to England in 1847, Hans Christian Andersen was overjoyed to make the acquaintance of 'the greatest writer of our time,' Charles Dickens. During the ten years following his return to Denmark, a friendly correspondence developed and culminated in his returning to England to spend five weeks as Dickens' guest at Gadshill. The visit was a failure and Dickens soon afterward broke off the correspondence" (Ford. George H. (Review of) Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens by Elias Bredsdorff. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol 12, No. 2 [Sept. 1957], p. 166).

Of Anderson's visit Dickens wrote, "…whenever he got to London, he got into wild entanglements of Cabs and Sherry, and never seemed to get out of them again until he came back here, and cut out paper into all sorts of patterns, and gathered the strangest little nosegays in the woods. His unintelligible vocabulary was marvelous" (Dickens, letter to William Jerdan, July 21, 1857).

The Danish Man Who Came To Dinner was supposed to stay with Dickens and his family for only two weeks. Though a genial host, Dickens dropped hints for Andersen to end his stay; they were, apparently, too subtle. The patience of the Dickens children was strained to the limit and daughter Kate would later recall that Andersen "was a bony bore, and stayed on and on" (Storey, Gladys. Dickens and Daughter. London, 1939). Andersen thoroughly enjoyed his visit, oblivious to the effect his extended holiday was having on his hosts. After he finally left, Dickens wrote on the mirror in the guestroom: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!” Clueless, Andersen never quite understood why Dickens afterward ceased to answer his letters.

Though the story may be apocryphal, it is said that "the bony bore" provided Dickens with the physical model for the obsequious Uriah Heep, the sharply limned character in David Copperfield, with, perhaps, a few of Andersen's personality traits added to the "very 'umble man."

The comic quality of Andersen's social awkwardness and  ineptitude provide the underlying significance of his work and the reason why his stories have endured and will remain classics. His earliest examples (Thumbelina, The Emperor's New Clothes, etc.), like those of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, though quite successful and bringing him fame, were interpretations of regional folk tales. His major contribution to world literature was to come with his second collection of stories, Nye Eventyre (New Fairly Tales) which were wholly original creations. In these stories, which include The Ugly Duckling, The Nightingale, The Red Shoes, The Snow Queen, The Little Match Girl, etc., the protagonists begin as sad, awkward, lonely characters adrift in a strange, often cruel world for which they are ill-equipped but, who, by story's end have overcome their circumstances and become misfit heroes, their hopes and yearnings fulfilled. Andersen had identified a universal archetype and it was him. Even more to the point, he was amongst the first writers who might be considered modern insofar as using the arc his personal life and psychological history as the basis for his characters.

It's interesting that Dickens, whose circumstances in childhood shaped his fiction, and Andersen, whose childhood informed his writing, were, at arm's length completely simpatico, but when drawn into close quarters for any length of time drove, at least Charles Dickens, nuts. Dickens, I imagine, preferred that his characters remain on the page and not come to actual life and wear out their welcome by showing up on his doorstep for an  interminable - and unendurable - stay, ala Sheridan Whiteside, who came to dinner and never left but at least was entertaining while terrorizing his hosts, "And now, will you all now leave quietly, or must I ask Miss Cutler to pass among you with a baseball bat?," a sentiment I suspect Dickens may have had success with had he directly expressed it to Andersen.

See: Dal, Eric, Nogle flere boger fra H.C. Andersen boghylde, in Andersenania 1992. Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 8. Sotheby's Sale LN8412, Lot 111.

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DICKENS, Charles. Pictures From Italy. The Vignette Illustrations on Wood, by Samuel Palmer. London: Published for the Author, by Bradbury & Evans, 1846. Second edition. Presentation Copy, inscribed by Dickens on the half-title in ink: "Hans Christian Anderson / From His friend and admirer / Charles Dickens / London Jul. 1847." Octavo. [8], 269, [1], [2, ads] pp.

Nineteenth-century full red crushed levant morocco  by F. Bedford (stamp-signed in gilt on front turn-in). Covers with gilt triple fillet border, spine decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, board edges ruled in gilt, turn-ins decoratively tooled in gilt, top edge gilt, others uncut.  Housed in a full dark green morocco pull-off box.

Cf. Smith II, 7. Cf. Eckel p. 126-127.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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The above is freely adapted from a post I wrote for DBRB in 2008.
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Charles Dickens on Booktryst:

Slumming with Charles Dickens: New York Library Relives his American Tours.

Charles Dickens' Model for the Modern Rehab Facility.

Charles Dickens' Deluxe Dental Tool is Top Pick at Bonhams.

Victorian Advertisements in Charles Dickens' Serial Novels.

Beyond A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens' Other Holiday Treats.

The Woman Who Infuriated Dickens.

All Points Bulletin: A "Pure" Pickwick Papers.
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